Wednesday 6 July 2011

gefen gluten free thin noodles


A seasonal food find as I found out when I went back to Sainsbury's. These were only stocked for Pesach (passover). And despite spending some time online I haven't been able to find a supplier, which is a shame as only having a single box to test a recipe is limiting.

My aim was to create a backpackers version of chicken noodle soup or lokshen as I remember it being being called when I was younger. My mother always used to administer this whenever a family member was ill. It's not a cure but, like all soups, it's a comfort food, it's easy to swallow, it helps rehydrate, and delivers calories thus helping the body to recover. So therefore ideal at the end of a long, hard day on the trail.

My memory of the dish was that it was thin like a consomme but I wanted to make it more harty, making sure that it had a good quantity of CHO ( carbohydrate) and therefore calories. One thing I do when building recipes is to work out how much CHO there is in the ingredient so I know how much insulin I will need. Unfortunately the nutrition facts panel is a bit confusing; it seems to imply that a single serving of 56g contains 82g of CHO! Although this may be based on the cooked weight, using 56g of dry ingredients. Looking at the 340 calories per serving, and with CHO having 4 calories per gram this would indicate again that there is 80g or so of CHO. I guess this must support my thinking that this is cooked weight. Why they cant just stick to using dry weight facts I don't know, I've come across this before with other dried foods, and it makes calculating how many insulin units I need difficult. Back to the recipe idea...

The base must be of good chicken stock so I always use Kallo low sodium and free range chicken stock cubes, one of each in this case. Apart from the noodles, I'm going to add some dried onion, dried garlic granules, diced dried carrot and swede, and some dried herbs. And if I have some shredded dehydrated chicken. The noodles take three minutes to cook, so it's important for the other ingredients to be hydrated before the noodles go in the pot. That's the idea, and I'll update once I've had a few attempts.

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